The Future Is Digital
I could be about to describe a horrible anxiety dream, but I'm not. The truth is I gave a presentation to some of the top bods in the radio industry during which I actually offered to strip naked and run around the room.
I'll get to the reason for that in a moment, but let me tell you a little bit more about the actual event. It was organised by Ofcom Scotland whose Director Vicki Nash greeted us all as we arrived at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Glasgow. By 'us' I mean a real variety of radio people drawn from the commercial and community sector and one or two folk from the BBC. We were there to talk about the future of radio in the digital world.
The most controversial speaker was Quentin Howard, President of the World DAB Forum. It's his job, he said, to tell people that DAB is the future for radio broadcasters, not just in the U.K. but in Europe and across the world. He listed country after country where DAB was taking off and where listeners would get added value from visual content on their sets and so on. He reminded me of one of those RAF officers you used to see in war movies. The ones who would stand in front of a map briefing the fighter pilots on their next mission.
"Of course, "he said, acknowledging there have been outspoken critics of the platform, "there are a few DAB terrorists out there who like to throw bombs at us and walk away. These people should be shot."
This extreme description of a DAB-doubter prompted quite a reaction from my colleagues in the commercial radio sector who say that have "sunk" £200 million into DAB in the past ten years but have seen no return on their money. There were stories of people who could only get a signal if they took their DAB sets to an upstairs bedroom. Others talked about the lack of actual sets that were available. In-car DAB was still a rare thing.
Quentin allowed that DAB had got off to a poor start in this country unlike Australia which, he said, had had a textbook launch. That didn't seem to make anyone feel better.
In the afternoon we heard from Lisa Kerr, the External Affairs Director at the Commercial Radio Companies Association. She talked about the challenges facing the industry - mainly economic - but also threw in a video of a radio stunt in which a man stripped naked in the studio and was then led out into the street. There was more to it than that, I'm sure, but by that time I had taken my seat at the front table and I couldn't quite follow what was happening on the screen behind me.
When it came my turn to speak about our online Zones experiment I admitted to the audience that I had no similar video with which to keep their attention.
"But if there's a lull, " I said, "I could strip off myself and run around the room."
Laughter, of course, but no real encouragement to actually do it.
Luckily.
© MMIX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~39~RS~)
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Jeff
Did you make any conclusions as to how you see the future of Digital Radio? DAB or Online? Satellite?
Norrie
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Norrie
Yes, I left convinced that DAB (or DAB+) is the future for mass broadcasting once the decision is taken to switch off the analogue transmitters, but that Wifi Internet will be useful for niche or supplementary activities like our zones.
There was talk of short-range DAB transmitters becoming so cheap that small community stations might be able to afford them too.
I think we'll soon see more DAB receivers in cars and that hybrid DAB/Internet radios will allow listeners to interact with radio stations, buy and download music etc.
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That is interesting, I know that people will be much more informed than me but I must admit I really love my DAB radio (although I am susprised at the poor reception and / or drop out at times) but I am finding more and more I listen online. I recently re-scanned my DAB radio and was surprised that there were not really any more stations.
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C.J. - 'Every silver lining has a cloud'
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Jeff - I did some work on digital radio way back in the day when it was a new technology and we were still awaiting 'standards' to devlop to visual content wedded to the 'carousel' of metadata attached to the broadcasts has always been possible, and I workewd on a wee pilot to add things like weather forecasts and traffic info to it as at that time the company I worked for was a content aggregator and could leverage loads of other stuff we had at the time to enrich DAB. But back then (9/10 years ago) there was insufficient vision right across the board to make it happen - from sales staff to ops staff to leaders in the sector. So we found it a real hard slog...
In truth, now, digital comms are starting to abound and you can actually carry radio content on unused radio bandwidth when for example your phone is not on a call. I remember somebody at Radio Clyde proposed that donkeys ago - again, it never really happened.
Perhaps now is the time? If we can have wideband CDMA-type in-car phones, why not DAB sitting on top of it?
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I am agree with the author the life is becoming digital slowly. In my point of view people using latest technologies to live their life and they are still trying to make more equipment's so that the work which they do will be done by future machines and that world will be called as digital world or digital life. http://www.dvds-online-rental-review.com
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I know I will regret asking, but why do we need this? Isn't analogue sufficient for our needs?
Answers in language a bairn can understand, please!
>8-D
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#9
Scotch - where does one start? You are asking me to box with one hand tied behind my back! Digital is superior to analogue (within the terms of this discussion) in so many ways. Leaving sound quality to one side, which can actually be poorer in bad signal areas, there are things like:
There is more, but I'd have to untie my other arm!
All of this can quite happily co-exist alongside online listening, which is a 'different beast' really. Online, we have the opportunity to listen streamed content (as with DAB or analogue) but also 'on demand', which is certainly going to be big in the future. We can also access content from other countries - I for example regularly listen to Dutch radio stations which would never be carried on DAB, and of course we know that Radio Scotland is listened to online by people in other countries. However, we have to actually pay for that privilege, whilst DAB is free.
The future is not digital - we already ARE digital. All that remains to be seen is how the various different delivery packages pan out and are to be funded. If I were to guess I'd say that we have not yet seen all that will be on offer.
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#10
Thanks, Jim. The cynic in me considered the possibility that it was a scam designed to make someone richer and me poorer. Much like different formats over the years have resulted in me buying the same albums on vinyl, tape and CD
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#11
Scotch - stay cynical! It's a healthy state of being especially in the world of media... The truth is that if nobody made money from new technology and content delivery channels, they would never happen. So the presence of a few circling vultures is surely a healthy sign! Entities like the BBC exist to keep us all on the straight and narrow. Long may it continue.
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I for one will welcome DAB (or DAB+) when I can receive Radio Scotland on it in the same (or better quality) as FM - as it stands now, stations are overcompressed and sound like they're coming from a wardrobe compared to stereo FM (and I can remember the switchover from mono to stereo).
Despite living in Scotland, in the digital TV guinea-pig land of the Borders, I cannot get Radio Scotland digitally - talk to the BBC and it's OFCOM's fault, talk to OFCOM and it's a commercial decision for the BBC. Here's a hint from a listener - I don't care whose decision it is, just hurry up and make it, and stop passing the buck!
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#13
True, and I do absolutely agree with you. However, reception quality on FM DOES vary enormously around the country due to the nature of how analogue signal degradation occurs, whereas digital does tend to 'hold up' better in poor S/N ratio areas. There is a trade-off, though, as DAB does not degrade 'gracefully' - meaning that when it is bad, it's REALLY bad. But that will change as more digital lobes appear over the spectrum.
As for compression, it's not JUST the compression but also the DSP that happens in the line from the desk to the transmitter that causes problems. In time that, too, will get better as the software improves. Remember, LOADS of compression also goes on with the analogue FM transmissions - more so with the commercial stations, I'd have to say. The BBC DO apply compression (as they must) but they do tend to uphold quality where it really affects the user experience (as with Radio 3). With the way that pop music is produced these days, you can compress it quite substantially before it really matters that much.
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